


A Brief Social History of the Serpent in London

by forthegreatergood



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Coming Untouched, Cuddling & Snuggling, Developing Relationship, Love Confessions, M/M, Metaphysical Sex, Mutual Pining, Pining, Shedding, Snake Crowley (Good Omens), Snake!Crowley - Freeform, sensory issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:20:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23779030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: Somehow, the times when it was most difficult to forget that Crowley was a demon were also the times when Aziraphale found it most difficult to resist picking him up.Aziraphale set his tea aside.  He couldn’t help the way his tongue darted out, chasing the last trace of sweetness on his lips.  He couldn’t help the way his fingers slowly, carefully, gently reached out, coming to rest without weight on those precious scales.  A warmth blossomed in the pads of his fingers, unfurled through the palm of his hand, and slithered up his arm.“Oh,” Aziraphale whispered.  It was a bliss he hadn’t felt often outside of Heaven, a heat that was almost light filling him with the inexorability and measure of water swelling a sponge.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 44
Kudos: 319





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> All characters property of Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and the respective production and licensing companies.
> 
> No beta because my impulse control is all going toward not spending my entire paycheck on takeout rn. Sorry, peeps!

Aziraphale returned from the kitchenette with his tea only to find Crowley curled up on the cushion he’d only just vacated a moment ago.

“Oh, you infernal nuisance,” he sighed. He’d settled on that precise spot because the light was perfect for reading, and there wasn’t even the slightest hint of a draft, and he could reach his tea on the side table without having to stretch for it. All Crowley was doing was napping in a birthday cake-sized mound of coils.

Aziraphale set his tea down and stooped over the serpent, who didn’t acknowledge his presence with even the barest flicker of an eyelid.

“I know you’re not asleep,” Aziraphale scolded quietly. “Even you can’t fall asleep that fast--I was only in the kitchen for a few minutes.”

There’d been neither hide nor scale of the demon when he’d gotten up, and Aziraphale had begun to think Crowley had let himself out one of the windows or slithered out the back door as he did every once in a while. It had been jarring, that first time or two he’d found himself chattering happily at an empty shop. 

It wasn’t that resuming his serpentine form _dampened_ Crowley’s essence, but there was a certain… Aziraphale considered it. A lower pitch, perhaps, to the demon’s presence. A more mellow quality, something a bit easier to miss in its absence if one wasn’t looking for it, a deeper, lingering comfort that persisted even after the demon himself had taken his leave.

It had taken some time to get used to, after he’d settled in the shop and Crowley had begun spending their odd evening or Sunday morning visit as a serpent as often as he did a man. Aziraphale had been surprised at first, but then sitting down for a cup of tea with a giant snake really did require a bit of privacy in most places, didn’t it? Crowley was large enough and striking enough to read as a portent no matter how the local populace felt about snakes in general. 

It had been suddenly difficult not to wonder which form he chose when he was alone at home, and even more difficult not to wonder what his home looked like. Aziraphale had accidentally issued a standing invitation to the bookshop--between his exuberance at opening the shop and the general feeling that Heaven was ascendant, the nod to good manners had quite gotten away from him--and Crowley had taken advantage of it. Crowley had neglected to inform him that the demon had even taken rooms, though Aziraphale had been fully capable of using his own sources to find out where Crowley was lurking. It hadn’t been difficult to draw a conclusion or two when Crowley’s address hadn’t changed in going on sixty years. 

Aziraphale could only assume based on Crowley’s cheerful lack of reciprocation that it was either under surveillance or a proper arboretum, perfectly suited for a reptile and equipped with nothing meant for a man. He’d wondered, when Crowley was slithering about the shop with that air of preoccupation he got sometimes, what it would be like to see Crowley in an environment properly suited for it. The demon was less easily distracted when he was like this, more focused, but at the same time it wasn’t as simple to deduce what would catch his attention. It had only been a passing fancy, though--there was only so much one could do with a bookshop to make it a more fitting home for a serpent.

Not that Crowley had ever seemed to mind. However much he might have preferred a nice sturdy tree branch, he was perfectly happy to curl up in the middle of a couch for a quick snooze. Aziraphale’s frown deepened. Probably more than happy--curling up on a tree branch wouldn’t deprive the lawful and just proprietor of his selected seat.

“Fine,” Aziraphale murmured, shaking his head. “Have it your way, then.”

He scooped Crowley up gently and waited for the inevitable indignant squirming and hissed rebuke. The serpent in his hands gave no sign of noticing Aziraphale’s manhandling, and Aziraphale found himself flushing slightly. Well. Perhaps Crowley really had managed to fall asleep in under five minutes flat. There weren’t many limits, when the demon truly set his mind to something. Aziraphale moved him to the side and deposited him carefully on a folded blanket, then reclaimed his spot.

“Oh,” he breathed, as he settled onto the couch. “Oh, my.”

The section where Crowley had been resting was deliciously warm against his backside, in spite of the chill of the room and the brevity of its occupation. Crowley’s scales had been almost as warm against his fingers as the teacup, and Aziraphale glanced at him. Cold-blooded, indeed. Crowley was warmer as a snake than he was as a man, though…

Aziraphale tripped over the thought even as it formed. The bare, accidental brush of fingertips over fingertips was hardly the best opportunity for judging how warm Crowley’s corporation was or wasn’t when it had limbs and a proper larynx. He’d always had the sense that Crowley ran a bit cooler than a human, but it was impossible to really tell when even the lightest of touches was enough to see Crowley twitching away and shooting him a sharp look.

Aziraphale glanced at the dark coils next to him, his brows furrowing. Maybe it was only that Crowley was asleep, and he’d have minded if he was awake. He retrieved his tea quickly, before his hands could forget the warmth that had weighed heavy in them. It wasn’t entirely his fault--Crowley had started it by stealing his spot. He’d never have dared as a biped, been too sure of being turfed right back out of it as soon as Aziraphale returned and saw what he’d done. But the serpent? Too certain by half that he wouldn’t be bothered over something so mundane as stealing a prime spot for reading.

Though it had almost been tempting to let him have it, just for the split second it had taken Aziraphale to marvel at the way the sun played over those polished scales, to soften at the way Crowley had reduced himself to fit so easily into that one patch of sunlight. There was a sharp, scorch-edged handsomeness to Crowley folded into a human shape, beautiful but clearly borrowed, a suit he still wasn’t entirely comfortable with putting on. Crowley as a serpent was a bronze mirror buffed bright and flawless, a marble statue rubbed until it shone in a perfect facsimile of life, a work of art quickened by that cunning hand.

Aziraphale sneaked a glance back at the red-edged black of Crowley’s coils, at the heavy lids veiling those marvelous golden eyes. Asleep and uncaring. Aziraphale sipped his tea, book on its way to forgotten. He found himself checking the desire to reach out and run his fingers over the shallow apex of Crowley’s spine at the rise and fall of his breathing. It shouldn’t have been so much more difficult to refrain from touching a snake than it was to refrain from touching a man, not with fangs and scales instead of clinging tunics and fashionable jackets and pleasant smiles and cups raised to his health. Not with all the warnings he’d gotten already, piled on top of scales and fangs. And yet…

He bit his lip. Aziraphale set his tea aside and picked up his book, turned back to his place. He couldn’t help the way his tongue darted out, chasing the last trace of sweetness on his lips. He couldn’t help the way his fingers slowly, carefully, gently reached out, coming to rest without weight on those precious scales. A warmth blossomed in the pads of his fingers, unfurled through the palm of his hand, and slithered up his arm. 

“ _Oh_ ,” Aziraphale whispered. It was a bliss he hadn’t felt often outside of Heaven, a heat that was almost light filling him with the inexorability and measure of water swelling a sponge.

Crowley exhaled slowly, and Aziraphale held his breath.

And then Crowley shivered slightly, a minute tremor running through his entire frame. His mouth quivered, then opened, a muscular, sensuous stretch that left Aziraphale staring at those long, needle-sharp teeth. Crowley’s jaws split until his mouth was almost a straight line before it began closing just as languorously as it had opened. An indolent twist of his head, and the serpent’s chin came to rest neatly over Aziraphale’s hand.

“Oh.” It wasn’t a whisper this time, and the warmth of Crowley’s body reached his heart, coiled there and let that steady beat drive it through the rest of his corporation.

One molten eye flickered open, then lowered again, the serpent utterly unconcerned by Aziraphale’s proximity. Aziraphale licked his lips and fought the urge to close his eyes and bask in it, in the warmth and the unconcern and the feel of smooth keratin under his fingers. He let his hand settle more heavily, let his fingers spread, his thumb fall open in something almost like a grip, possessiveness percolating up through those carefully maintained defenses.

_Let me hold you, please, just let me hold you for a little while._

Crowley didn’t stir, just continued to let his head rest on Aziraphale’s hand, let Aziraphale’s hand rest on his back. He was beautiful in his quietude, and that trust licked at the edges of Aziraphale’s heart as bright and hot as any fire.

When every cell in Aziraphale’s body was overflowing with it, he closed his eyes against the sight, relaxed against the couch cushions and just let himself breathe, timing the slow swell of his chest with Crowley’s. The light was fading from the sky when Crowley finally stirred again, lifting his head and yawning, whole body tightening in a preparatory flex.

Aziraphale withdrew his hand surreptitiously, curling it around the edge of his book and turning a page as if nothing had happened. Crowley uncoiled slowly, at his leisure, then slithered off the couch, and Aziraphale’s fingers tightened around the book as he smothered the impulse to snatch the serpent back up. He watched the slow undulation of that powerful body as Crowley slithered toward the kitchen, a sympathetic hunger tightening his own stomach.

He stiffened his spine and set the book aside, getting up from the couch with a forced smile. “Oh, my dear--let me!”

Crowley paused, head swiveling back to regard him, brilliant gaze washing over him like the memory of the heat from his scales. It was hard not to stumble at that, at the flutter of its echo in his heart.

“Eggs or milk?” he asked cheerfully, bustling past Crowley.

“ _Eggsss_ ,” Crowley said after a moment, following him.

Aziraphale beamed at him, hand already reaching for a carton of duck’s eggs that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “Of course, my dear. Of course. Anything you like.”


	2. Chapter 2

Crowley stretched irritably, rubbing his snout on the baseboard. He flicked out his tongue and slithered along the wall, restive to the point of agitation, and Aziraphale sighed and pulled off his gloves. The book he’d been hoping to repair would have to wait, wouldn’t it?

“If you’re going to insist on doing that here, I’m going to insist on you doing it properly,” he said, shaking his head.

Aziraphale scooped the errant serpent up as if he was wrangling an uncooperative power cable, and Crowley hissed and snapped at him, jaws closing with a damp click a bare centimeter from Aziraphale’s hand.

“Now see here, Crowley,” Aziraphale scolded, hoisting him up so that they were at eye level. “I know you’re uncomfortable and out of sorts, but I won’t have you taking your temper out on me.”

Crowley stuck his tongue out, slow and long enough that it felt like the insult it was doubtless intended as, but didn’t offer to bite him again. Aziraphale huffed and tucked Crowley under his arm, careful of those clouded eyes and the fragile-looking skin at the edges of his lips.

“You could have done this at home and had all the privacy you wanted, you know,” Aziraphale told him, carrying him up the stairs. “Since you chose not to do so, you’re simply going to have to try and keep a stiff upper lip about the consequences.”

A soft puff of breath against his wrist and an angrily twitching tail told him all he needed to know about the sort of grace Crowley intended to bring to the situation.

Aziraphale elbowed the bathroom door open. As if Crowley didn’t know full well when he was about to shed his skin. The demon had been picking at his food and peevish for almost a month now; it had been like pulling teeth even to get him to go out for coffee of a morning.

“How about a nice soak?” Aziraphale asked brightly.

Crowley glared at him, and Aziraphale rolled his eyes and closed the door behind them.

“I am not patronizing you. I’m just trying to put a nicer face on things, that’s all,” Aziraphale muttered, shaking his head.

He lowered Crowley into the bathtub and snapped his fingers, filling the air with the sort of damp heat more suited for a sauna.

“If you don’t want a bath, what about some moss? Or…” He tried to recall what he’d seen in Crowley’s flat. The last time this had happened, he’d given in to curiosity and tried for a look inside the apartment, only to get the door slammed in his face in a fit of shedding-related pique. “Ah! River rocks?”

“ _I’m ssshedding my ssskin, not my dignity_ ,” Crowley grumbled.

“Yes, I noticed how dignified you were being, leaving nostril-prints all over the wainscotting,” Aziraphale said tartly. “The very picture of stateliness.”

He turned to the sink and ran a washcloth under the tap, warming it even as he wrung it out.

Crowley at least held still while he draped it over the back of the demon’s skull and the base of his neck. Aziraphale checked the impulse to rub gently to loosen the old skin--it wasn’t quite how it happened, it seemed. Not that he could necessarily extrapolate how it was for Crowley based on how it went with natural snakes, but none of the rest of it had seemed too far off of what he’d seen from Crowley during a shed, so…

“Are you sure you don’t want to soak a bit?” Aziraphale asked gently.

Crowley scoffed and rubbed his snout on the porcelain, then curled up in a truculent ball. “ _Maybe jussst a bit. If it would make you feel better._ ”

“Immensely.” Aziraphale couldn’t resist the quick, gentle stroke of a fingertip behind Crowley’s eyes, and Crowley flicked his tongue out again. He rolled up his sleeves and filled the tub until it was three fingers deep, then settled onto the mat next to the tub and watched while Crowley gradually relaxed, clearly taking pains not to show Aziraphale how much better it felt.

_Sulky thing._ It wasn’t that Aziraphale didn’t sympathize--he imagined it couldn’t be at all comfortable, having one’s entire skin sloughing off like that. But there was plenty to be done to make it a bit less miserable, and instead of asking for help or being proactive about it at all, Crowley seemed bound and determined to pretend it wasn’t happening until there was nothing else for it.

“Isn’t that better?” he asked softly, when Crowley uncoiled and spread out in the water.

“ _Maybe_ ,” Crowley grunted. “ _A bit._ ”

Aziraphale leaned his elbow on the lip of the tub and tried to hide a fond smile. “Is there anything else that might help?”

Crowley huffed and slithered a short circuit around the tub, looping around and over himself restlessly. His tongue tested the edges of his peeling skin as he went, and Aziraphale couldn’t help reaching down to stroke the top of his head again. He barely suppressed a small gasp at the way Crowley’s body heat had leached into the water, turning it warm as blood.

“Perhaps if I got in with you?” he wanted to ask. Wanted to and couldn’t, didn’t dare try putting words to it.

It was one thing when he was fresh back from a trip Upstairs, suddenly and inescapably aware of how little ambient grace there was to be found on Earth, shivering at nothing and stoking the fire and swaddling himself in blankets that wouldn’t help but were better than passively accepting that he couldn’t fix what was wrong, and found himself with an oversized serpent curling up in his lap without so much as a by your leave. It was one thing to have that deathly chill driven from his bones by an idle demon sprawled carelessly across his thighs, loops half-spilling over his knees and up his belly, with never a word exchanged. It was quite another to offer, to ask for, to negotiate.

“ _Of all the blesssed_ \--” Crowley broke off and rubbed his snout against his back, then against the porcelain again, then finally against Aziraphale’s fingers. He paused at that, milky eyes narrowing. “ _Hold ssstill?_ ”

“Of course, but what--oh!” Aziraphale laughed softly when Crowley shoved his entire face into Aziraphale’s hand, squirming and butting like an overexcited ferret. “Dear Lord, would you calm down? There’s hardly a time limit, is there?”

Crowley hissed petulantly when Aziraphale pulled his hand back. 

“The ring, my dear,” Aziraphale said, sliding the band off his finger and tucking it into his pocket. “There we are.”

He lowered his hand again, steadied his arm against the side of the bathtub, and held firm as Crowley put the not-inconsiderable strength of his coiled body behind pushing his snout across the blade of Aziraphale’s hand. Aziraphale’s eyes widened as the old skin finally began to sheet away.

“Do you need me to do anything?” Aziraphale asked. The slough was almost to Crowley’s eyes, and there was a potential for harm there that had Aziraphale’s heart quivering in his chest. Crowley knew what he was doing, surely--was made of sterner stuff than a garden snake--but all the same, if ever there was a moment that fell under the definition of exigent circumstances, it would be a demonic serpent rubbing his eyecaps all over an agent of Heaven.

“ _Nnf._ ” Crowley let himself drop back into the water and shivered, spraying droplets everywhere. “ _Back of the hand?_ ”

Aziraphale turned his palm away, and a slow, quiet thrill crept up his spine as Crowley dragged his lips precisely and deliberately across the delicate skin on the back of his hand. Crowley angled his head down at the last moment, putting a subtle twist of pressure on the rim of the eyecap without risking the eye itself. Every time Crowley repeated the gesture, the old skin lifted a sliver more, revealing the tender new scales with their vibrant colors.

Once both eyecaps were off, Crowley sank into the water for a moment, blinking and squinting, and Aziraphale found himself cradling his hand against his breast.

“ _Didn’t bruissse you, did I?_ ” Crowley asked, his gaze focusing on Aziraphale’s hands.

“Hmm?” Aziraphale blinked at him, too astonished by the bright clear gold of Crowley’s eyes to quite register what the demon had said. He could lose himself in those extraordinary depths, warm himself forever by that comforting glow. He glanced down to find himself retracing the serpent’s touch with his own fingers, nails dragging ever so lightly across the back of his hand. “Ah. Erm. No. Quite all right.”

Crowley settled back down, a long, quiet, relieved-sounding hiss escaping him. He rubbed the hinge of his jaw on his back and seemed to grimace.

“Here,” Aziraphale said quickly, reaching out again. Crowley regarded him silently, and Aziraphale found himself blushing at the scrutiny. “I mean, that is, if you want. I’d prefer to help, if you’ll let me.”

Crowley butted the side of his face against Aziraphale’s hand, but it was gentler this time, less frantic. Aziraphale almost held his breath as the pale rind peeled away, off the back of Crowley’s skull and down that vulnerable juncture of neck and head. There was a softness to the scales being unveiled, a tender newness to them that made him wish for a fleeting, fluttering instant that he hadn’t given away his sword. Crowley was hardly defenseless, but still--he could be hurt, and there were so many who wouldn’t hesitate.

Aziraphale traced a cautious finger down the ridge of Crowley’s spine, and the serpent shivered.

“Do you want me to… should I, ah… hold on to it?” Aziraphale offered. “You could just sort of wriggle out of it like that time you got stu--” A murderously sharp glare cut him off and almost made him laugh at the worst possible moment. “Like the time you took a nap in one of my scarves.”

“ _Not hold onto it, no,_ ” Crowley murmured, wallowing thoughtfully in the tub. He eased himself into a loose coil, then dipped his head. “ _Put your hand on me, asss if you were trying to hold onto me inssstead._ ”

“Ah.” Aziraphale could feel a flush beginning, kindling to life in the tips of his ears and the base of his throat.

“ _Unlesss you’d rather not?_ ” Crowley asked, and those bright, bright eyes were on him again, hypnotic and piercing and surely Crowley _knew_. He was a creature of Hell, the original temptation--it was impossible that he didn’t know, hadn’t sensed it every single time Aziraphale had wanted to hold him fast and not let go.

“No, I’ll--of course I’ll help. I just don’t want to injure you, that’s all.” Aziraphale cleared his throat and made a show of giving his hand and arm a shake. He shot Crowley a reassuring smile, then wrapped his hand around the serpent’s back just above the slough and squeezed carefully.

Crowley grunted softly, a noise Aziraphale felt more than heard, and then undulated forward, stretching and squeezing his way through Aziraphale’s hand with a single-mindedness that sent a thin flash of regret through his nervous system. That would be how it was if he ever gave in and tried to keep Crowley, wouldn’t it--all that focus and power suddenly bent toward the goal of freeing himself from an angel’s too-tight grasp. 

Aziraphale tried to ignore the thought. It was ridiculous on the face of it, the idea of him trying to keep Crowley when Crowley didn’t want to be kept. As if Aziraphale even wanted a demon skulking about his shop day in and day out. The old skin bunched at Aziraphale’s fingers, separating easily from the resplendent creature who slithered through them, and Aziraphale smothered a gasp at how lovely Crowley was like this. Each new scale was like a finely-carved jewel, and the clinging mist refracted every bit of light that much more brightly.

When they were finished, Crowley was curled up in a heap, as close to spent as Aziraphale had seen him in such a quiet setting and beautiful enough to take an angel’s breath away.

“Let me put you to bed, Crowley,” Aziraphale said, voice pitched quiet and low enough that he hoped Crowley wouldn’t catch the plea in it.

“ _Hmph._ ” Crowley’s lids drooped, and he absently licked a few drops from his lips. “ _The couch isss jussst fine, angel._ ”

Aziraphale bit his lip, then gave in. Better the couch than Crowley trying to slither under the sofa or stay in the tub. He pulled out the largest towel he had, then miracled it soft and warm as a receiving blanket. “Up you go, then.”

“ _Mrr?_ ” Crowley’s eyes opened again as Aziraphale lifted him out of the water and lowered him onto the towel nested neatly in Aziraphale’s lap. “ _Really?_ ”

“Well, I’m not letting you get everything damp,” Aziraphale said, shaking his head. He began running the towel gently over Crowley’s scales, starting with that glistening head and working his way down the muscular bow of the serpent’s body. “Not in this weather--the upholstery will molder.”

Crowley grumbled but arched into it, lifting coils out of the way so that Aziraphale could run the towel over his belly and then down the next length of spine.

“See?” Aziraphale asked, cheeks warm with Crowley’s weight and Crowley’s beauty and Crowley’s compliance. It had perhaps been a miscalculation to try the serpent’s heat between his thighs. “Isn’t that better?”

Crowley hissed something that might have been a grudging agreement, then yawned.

“Would you like something to eat before you take a nap?” Aziraphale asked, mindful of his grip on the serpent as he got to his feet. Crowley was as likely as not to object to being carried at all, after so much fussing. Then again, perhaps he’d rather Aziraphale carry him than have the risers or the rugs rubbing on the still-soft scales of his belly.

“ _Maybe later,_ ” Crowley sighed, rearranging himself so that he half-spilled out of Aziraphale’s hands. Aziraphale bit back a curse and scrambled to keep the demon from falling, and then bit back another curse at how exquisite Crowley felt draped over his bare forearms, that sleek body moving over his skin like satin.

He carried Crowley back downstairs and set him down gingerly on the softest blanket in the shop, lingering even as he knew he should find some excuse to step away and collect himself. It was so easy to get lost in the gloss of Crowley’s scales. He’d never realized how much like Crowley’s feathers they were, how the black disguised a depth of vibrant color that only came to life in full sun.

Aziraphale pulled himself away. Tea. A cup of tea, that was what he needed. When he came back, Crowley had stretched out across the cushions and looked as if he might be contemplating the space beneath it after all.

“Come now, you’re not sleeping on the floor,” Aziraphale told him.

Crowley shot him a narrow look, and Aziraphale swallowed at the darkening hue of his eyes. A little closer to bronze now than brass, and still, Aziraphale could lose himself in them. He sat down primly at the edge of the couch and sipped his tea, reaching for his latest novel so that he wouldn’t reach for a serpent instead. His skin itched to feel that perfect silkiness one more time before it was gone, hardened into the normal armored smoothness that kept Crowley safe from harm.

And then Crowley was looping back across the sofa, coiling over Aziraphale’s arm and angling his face so that he could read the cover.

“ _Mill on the Flosss?_ ” Crowley asked, his lips curling back. “ _Oh, absssolutely not._ ”

“I don’t remember asking your opinion on--Crowley!” Aziraphale pursed his lips, looked up from what was very suddenly and very demonstrably a copy of _Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy_ , and took a sharp breath. “I’ll thank you not to _tamper_ with my books.”

“ _Who’sss tampering, angel? Improving, that’sss what I’m about,_ ” Crowley said smugly, letting a full half a coil drape across Aziraphale’s lap.

“It was a first edition.”

“ _Ssstill a firssst edition_ ,” Crowley said, flicking out his tongue. “ _Hot off the presssesss, asss they sssay. ’sssidesss, pretty sssure that’sss one I got you. Like exsschanging a presssent that didn’t fit right._ ”

Aziraphale’s protest that it wasn’t in the least bit like that was cut short by the serpent shoving the rest of the coil across his thighs, artless and floundering and heavy. He couldn’t tell how much of it was fatigue and how much of it was Crowley’s eternal love of making a pest of himself, but he certainly wasn’t going to let the demon tease him with it for the next quarter hour.

Aziraphale gathered Crowley up carefully, rearranged the serpent neatly and comfortably in his lap, and then let his hand rest lightly on the back of Crowley’s neck. Crowley suffered through it with the affronted disapproval of a cat finding itself squished into a child’s grubby embrace, then flicked out his tongue and closed his eyes.

“Sleep well, my dear,” Aziraphale murmured. He reached for the book again and decided at the last minute that he could wait a few days to miracle it back. He remembered the ending of Eliot’s story being a bit grim in a way he’d found difficult to enjoy; Crowley’s taste in literature was beyond suspect, but he remained averse to full tragedies.

“ _Ssspy novelsss, angel,_ ” Crowley chuckled, one eye cracking open just as Aziraphale began to read. “ _They’re where it’sss at. Wave of the future, you’ll sssee._ ”

“Sleep well, my dear,” Aziraphale said more firmly.

Crowley huffed, wriggled determinedly down into his lap, and closed his eyes again. Aziraphale swallowed, the novel almost entirely forgotten at the shock of the warmth infusing his corporation. Crowley was teasing him, surely. Crowley was teasing him. And yet, Crowley was nevertheless there, draped across Aziraphale’s legs, letting Aziraphale caress him at his leisure, in no hurry to shake Aziraphale’s hand from the back of his neck. 

Aziraphale chewed his lip and closed his eyes, letting his grip go ever so slightly tighter. Crowley sighed, a slow exhale that Aziraphale could feel tightening his own ribs, and flexed sinuously against him. Then Aziraphale relaxed, let his fingers go loose, and it was as if it had never happened. Crowley lapsed back into the indolent pose he’d assumed before, and Aziraphale forced his heart back into its normal rhythm, forced the tremor from his hands, forced himself to breathe slowly.

“Sleep well, my dear,” he whispered, and pretended to read his book.


	3. Chapter 3

Crowley shook out the morning paper and frowned at its contents, thin lips pursing in something like righteous indignation. “Abnormal weather patterns linked to climate change! Mass hysteria! Coincidental industrial accident! Angel, have you read this drivel?”

“Well, I was going to, but then demonic interference resulted in me losing track of it,” Aziraphale said mildly, leaning back in his chair and enjoying the ringside view of Crowley’s theatrics.

Crowley glanced at him over the top of the paper, amber eyes narrowing. “I did ask--”

“You asked if I minded as you were snatching it out of my hands, dear,” Aziraphale reminded him, smiling. “My only response was, in fact, ‘Do I mind what?’”

“Hmph. Don’t _look_ like you mind,” Crowley grumbled, disappearing back behind the paper with a faint blush.

“No, I suppose I don’t.” Aziraphale sipped his tea and sighed. It was hard to mind anything at the moment, with the world spinning along as well as it ever did and the two of them finally at loose ends. Crowley had given him a lift home from the Ritz and invited himself in for a nightcap and fallen asleep on the couch, and that had, essentially, been that.

“Three days, and they’re already trying to just,” Crowley waved a hand indignantly, “ _forget_ about everything!”

“Don’t you think that’s rather for the best?” Aziraphale asked. It had all been more than a little traumatic, and people had a funny way of dealing with trauma, sometimes. He didn’t like to think of some new crusade spinning out of control as a frightened populace turned to demagogues and false prophets for comfort.

Crowley opened his mouth, shut it again, and then scoffed. “I don’t mean I think the UN should be sending a peace-keeping force up the Burj Khalifa to have a word with good old Gabriel, though it would serve him fucking right if he had to deal with that for a bit, wouldn’t it? It’s just… y’know, if ever there was a big fucking sign from on high that maybe it’s time to get serious about not sending the whole species off the edge of oblivion and, I don’t know, have a good hard think about nuclear disarmament, or…” He shook himself, hair catching the sunlight as his head bobbed. “Fuck. You know what I’m saying.”

“I do, but it seems a little unfair to fault them for being the same as they’ve been since the beginning,” Aziraphale said. Individuals grew and transformed and surprised him constantly, but _humanity_ was another story entirely. His smile turned lopsided and wistful, and he hid it behind his teacup. “Not to impugn your first and most storied triumph, but you can’t tell me it was as hard as all that to talk the pair of them into eating that apple.”

Crowley stared at him and then looked away, the very picture of offended dignity. “No, not to impugn it at all. Anything else you want to not-impugn while you’re at it? Maybe allege that the Antichrist never even made it to Tadfield? Could be we were all just playing find-the-lady with three perfectly ordinary babies while the real Son of Satan was bawling away behind the crisps in a Tesco. It was just luck of the draw that Adam had powers--ineffable coincidence!”

“My dear,” Aziraphale said, letting his tone go firm and his eyes narrow.

“Fine,” Crowley snapped, turning back to the paper. “I’m being unfair, hoping they could seize the opportunity to be a little less predictable.”

“They’ll muddle through,” Aziraphale told him. They always had, no matter how many times Crowley had been convinced they wouldn’t and Aziraphale had been secretly worried that they weren’t meant to. Not that it hadn’t sometimes taken a monumental effort and a truly staggering deliberate misinterpretation of orders on their parts, but it had all worked out for the best. “They always do.”

“Well, they almost didn’t, and it’d be nice if it got them to at least give the brakes a quick check, just in case they might want to use them at some point,” Crowley said. He put the paper down and rubbed his eyes, then folded it up and shoved it across the table. “Fuck it. All yours, angel.”

He got to his feet, a sudden nervous energy animating him, and Aziraphale went through the motions of skimming the paper.

“The crossword’s done,” he said, straightening up and giving Crowley a shirty look. None of the answers were even remotely correct, and yet the demon had managed to make everything form words in both directions. “You never got a pen anywhere near it!” 

Crowley shrugged. “Impugn my accomplishments at your peril, angel.”

“If this is how you’re going to behave after I make breakfast, then I think you’ll be taking care of lunch, my dear,” Aziraphale said, his eyes already going to the list of gallery openings at the bottom of the facing page. There was one on Sunday--a modern take on Bernini--that Crowley could milk for hours upon hours of complaining even as he loved every minute of it. Aziraphale never had gotten a clear answer out of the demon on what it was he’d found so objectionable about the artist that he’d feigned an answering dislike of the art. Maybe it had only ever been Aziraphale favoring him so much that Crowley had felt obligated to at least pretend to take Hell’s part.

“Ah.” Crowley’s hands clenched at that, then relaxed as if he was forcing them back open. “Mind a rain check on that? Maybe dinner at that new French place you’ve been hinting at?”

“I haven’t been hinting at a new French place,” Aziraphale protested, more stung than he’d have expected. “And yes, dinner there would be lovely. I didn’t realize you had plans.”

“Not per se, but.” Crowley shrugged sharply. “Been underfoot here long enough, haven’t I?”

It was Aziraphale’s turn to open his mouth and utterly fail to find a proper response. 

“I hadn’t noticed,” he said finally. He’d rather assumed--rather hoped on, rather been overjoyed at the prospect of--Crowley’s intention to simply move in. “That is, you haven’t been underfoot. At all. It’s been lovely having you.”

“You know what they say. Dead fish and guests and all.” Crowley made a face. “Pick you up for dinner at six?”

“Yes, I…” Aziraphale bit his lip. Was it something he’d said? Crowley hadn’t seemed genuinely put out at anything, until all the sudden he’d been bound and determined to leave. “That would be wonderful.”

Aziraphale watched him go, heart aching in the sudden cold of his chest. It was the fact that there was no space in between Crowley deciding to go and Crowley going, he decided--that’s why it felt like such a blow. Crowley didn’t need to stop and gather his things, didn’t need to get his coat off a peg or fish his keys out of a dish by the door. It was just a quick “See you later!” and then off he went. He might as well have just turned around from putting the dishes in the sink to find himself addressing an empty room.

Aziraphale put his elbows on the table and kneaded his temples. It had to have been something he’d said. Crowley’d seemed perfectly fine for the past two days--drowsing on the couch, pouting that Aziraphale didn’t have a television, pouting that Aziraphale wouldn’t let him order him a television, eating all the eggs Aziraphale cared to feed him, rifling through Aziraphale’s wine collection and reminiscing about all the holes they’d put in it over the years. He hadn’t seemed tempted to transform into a snake and sulk under something even once, had been content to just tug a blanket up over his head and burrow a little deeper under the cushions before going to sleep.

For the life of him, though, Aziraphale couldn’t find anything different in tenor or import than the same conversations they’d been having for centuries. He ran his fingers through his hair and sat back. If Crowley had taken offense at something, then that was Crowley’s prerogative, and only Crowley could tell him what it was that had set him off. But he had no intention of suffering through dinner with a prickly demon on the other side of the table when they should be enjoying themselves and their new-found freedom. Time to put that cleverness Crowley had spent the last week shouting at him about to good use, wasn’t it?

* * *

Aziraphale smoothed down his waistcoat and jacket and squared his shoulders, then took a deep breath and rang the bell. He imagined Crowley yanking the door open, still irritated with him, and his carefully-rehearsed speech flew apart on him like an unruly deck of cards. Crowley surely couldn’t be that peeved with him? No. There would have been some little parting shot, some cutting remark, before he’d taken his leave. There would have been huffing and stomping.

Instead of an angry demon opening it and snarling, the door simply clicked open of its own accord, and Aziraphale hummed to himself. He poked his head into the apartment.

“Crowley?”

“ _It’sss open_.” Crowley’s voice, from nowhere and everywhere all at once, and oh, he _did_ sound cranky. Aziraphale hurried in off the mat and shut the door behind him.

“Is everything all right?” he asked, rearranging the packages in his arms. The small rain forest somehow contained in Crowley’s apartment showed no sign of the snake in the proverbial grass, though there were a thousand places he could be hiding. Aziraphale ventured farther in, keeping to the polished marble footpath that had appeared when he’d paused on the threshold the night Crowley had given him shelter.

“ _Peachy,_ ” Crowley said, and Aziraphale finally spotted him, partially submerged in a shallow pool surrounded by mossy rocks and small, aggressively verdant shrubs. “ _You don’t need to ring the bell, angel._ ”

“Well, I didn’t want to just barge in on you.” Aziraphale set everything but the the linchpin of his whole plan down in the foyer and drew closer to the pool. “I’m not interrupting, am I?”

“ _No._ ” Crowley rested his chin on the rocks and flicked out his tongue. “ _Thought we agreed on sssix isss all. And that I’d be picking you up._ ”

“Oh! Yes, quite. It’s just I was out doing some shopping, and I got rather more than I expected, and I thought, well, if you were going to be popping down to the shop anyway, that you might, ah.” Aziraphale shrugged apologetically. “Give me a lift?”

Crowley regarded him, serpentine face unreadable, and Aziraphale worried at his lower lip. Crowley had known him since Eden. Crowley knew full well he was capable of carrying ton-weight boulders, if he wanted, and that was before simply miracling everything including himself back to the shop entered into it. Moreover, Crowley knew full well that _Aziraphale_ knew that he knew it.

Then Crowley’s burnished gaze focused on the bait in Aziraphale’s arms, and he slithered noiselessly out of the pool, half his coils disappearing effortlessly among the plants. “ _What isss_ that _?_ ”

Aziraphale feigned confusion and looked behind him, arms tightening on the pot cradled against his chest.

“The shopping? Yes, well, as I said--got a bit carried away. It’s been a while since I did anything with the shop decor and all--”

“ _Not the bagsss_ ,” Crowley hissed. The greenery barely moved as the massive predator wound through it, almost invisible in the shadows. “ _That_ thing _in the pot_.”

“Oh, this?” Aziraphale asked innocently, glancing back at the plant in his arms as if surprised that it was still there. “Impulse purchase, I’m afraid. It was right by the register, and the flowers were so lovely, I just couldn’t resist.”

Crowley emerged from the undergrowth and reared up, his body rising until he could glare directly at the offending plant. “ _You jussst couldn’t resssissst._ ”

“Yes. Quite a bargain, too! Half off,” Aziraphale said, pleased with himself. He’d spent a good twenty minutes rooting through the sale bins looking for a plant he actually wanted that would also send Crowley flying into a frothing rage the moment he laid eyes on it.

“ _Becaussse it’s three-quartersss dead, angel,_ ” Crowley growled, neck tilting and weaving so that he could get a better look at it from multiple angles.

“What?” Aziraphale gasped, looking down at the flowers. He might have overdone it a little--he hadn’t meant to pick a genuine lost cause. And the blossoms were so pretty… Surely Crowley was exaggerating for dramatic affect. “I’ll admit, it’s looking a little ragged, but surely with a bit of love and care? I had plans for Viola here.”

“ _No._ ” Crowley flicked out his tongue and glared. “ _Under no cssircumssstancssesss are you to name them._ ”

“But.” Aziraphale held the plant out. “Viola. Because she’s a violet. And, you know, after the girl in _Twelfth Night_.”

Crowley stared at him, and Aziraphale gave him a weak smile, hoping that he hadn’t pushed too far and the serpent’s next move wouldn’t be back into the pool. “ _Angel._ ”

Aziraphale drew himself up to his full height. “Please don’t speak to me in that tone of voice, Crowley.”

Crowley’s eyes closed, and Aziraphale could see the red scales shifting to accommodate the deep breaths Crowley was taking.

“ _Angel, it’sss a fucking geranium._ ”

“Oh.” Aziraphale pursed his lips and looked down at the flowers. They looked close enough to an African violet, which was what the bin it had been in had said on the side. How was he supposed to have known? “Well, it’s too late now. She already answers to it.”

“ _Sssatan’sss sssake,_ ” Crowley sighed. He dropped to his belly and disappeared back into the foliage. After a moment, Aziraphale caught a glimpse of copper hair and pale skin. Crowley stood up and brushed himself off, then stalked back toward Aziraphale.

“You really don’t have to--” Aziraphale gestured at the ferns. “--sneak off to transform, you know.”

“What I _know_ is that you’ve _named_ a plant that should have been repotted back when fucking _Thatcher_ was in office,” Crowley grumbled, snatching the pot deftly out of Aziraphale’s hands without slowing down.

“I say!” Aziraphale sputtered, scurrying after him. “Crowley, you unhand that… that geranium at once!”

“An angel geranium,” Crowley snorted to the plant. “Of course you are. Couldn’t have been an ivy or a regal, no.” Crowley stopped short and turned on his heel to give Aziraphale a narrow look, and Aziraphale barely managed to keep from colliding with him. “You did this on purpose.”

“I… what? Why would I…? _How_ would I…?” Aziraphale could feel a flush rising on his cheeks. Crowley always knew, blast him. “What was it I’m supposed to have done on purpose, exactly?”

“This,” Crowley said, jerking his free hand about in a careless arc that could have encompassed the whole room. 

Aziraphale let his gaze sweep the gigantic terrarium Crowley had instead of a living room, then looked back to the demon, eyebrows drawn and face carefully wiped clean of any trace of subterfuge.

“Gah.” Crowley huffed and turned away again, stalking deeper into the apartment. “I don’t need you to admit it--I know you did.”

“Fine, dear,” Aziraphale murmured, following him. Beyond anything else, he was curious to see if Crowley had left the bits of furniture he’d added for Aziraphale when he’d stayed the night. “Whatever gets you through the day, I suppose.”

“Whatever gets me through the blessed day!” Crowley echoed, outrage lending his voice a volume it didn’t normally reach. It practically echoed off the closer walls of the proper rooms past the little forest in the den. “This is what he says to me. Can you believe what I’m expected to put up with?” Crowley thunked the plant down on a bench and smoothed his hair back as he looked around. He seized a new pot about twice as large as the existing one from a neat stack of them, and a small bag of soil whose front advertised all sorts of dubious benefits. “This is what you’ve got to look forward to, assuming you survive.” He glared at Aziraphale and scoffed. “Whatever gets me through the day.”

“I really thought it was a violet,” Aziraphale said, after a moment of Crowley silently staring at the plant. “The whole section was supposed to be African violets.”

“And the part where you could’ve gotten a healthier one out of a compost heap?” Crowley grunted.

“Well, I…” Aziraphale twisted his ring and grimaced. _I wanted an excuse to come over._ “I felt sorry for it, I suppose.”

Crowley closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose before giving Aziraphale an almost persecuted look. “Where are you planning on putting this blessed thing, then?”

“In the window,” Aziraphale said immediately. He _had_ given it some thought, beyond Crowley’s reaction. “It should get plenty of light, and it’s a bit less drafty than the rest of the shop this time of year.”

“Drafty?” Crowley said, frowning. “Shop’s not that drafty.”

He produced a roll of butcher paper from the bottom shelf of the bench, then tore off a large section, dunked it in a watering can, and laid it out flat on the table. A generous heap of potting soil was mounded up in the center like a miniature volcano, and Aziraphale fidgeted with his ring.

“Well, not that you’d notice.” He managed a smile. “We can’t all have fire permeating our corporations, you know.”

Not to mention that it wasn’t so bad, when Crowley was there. He had a way of heating up a room like a radiator, of knocking the worst of a chill right out of a place.

“I can still tell when a place is drafty, angel.” Crowley picked up the geranium and tapped the pot lightly on the edge of the table, rotating it as he went, until he could pry the pot-shaped wad of spent soil and root from it without undue damage. “Fuck’s sake.”

He sucked at his teeth and held it over a rubbish bin, thumbs gently digging into the center of the crumbling dirt and vermiculite at the bottom. Aziraphale could see the roots at the base, chasing each other round and round in a circle.

“Are they supposed to be…?”

“No.” Crowley pried the rings apart, carefully and little by little, and the old dirt fell away into the bin below. Once he was satisfied, he mounted what was left on top of the volcano and gently smoothed the straightened roots down around the fresh soil. They were still going every which way, but it seemed more of a natural state instead of a smothered, cramped thing. Crowley leaned forward and wagged his index finger at it. “Stay.”

“Will she live?” Aziraphale asked, twisting his ring. He hadn’t expected the whole operation to be so gruesome, more of a dissection than what he’d rather thought it would take to get the plant comfortably at home in a bigger pot.

“On her own?” Crowley shrugged. “With you and an infinite supply of…?” He held up a dirt-smeared hand and pantomimed a snap. “I’d expect. Will she be happy?” He began carefully adding small handfuls of moistened potting soil to the exterior of the volcano, covering the roots and turning it into more of a cylinder. “If she’s not a blessed idiot.”

“Be nice,” Aziraphale protested. “She’s been neglected.”

Crowley grunted, then brushed the loose substrate off his hands and folded up the wet paper until the whole thing was a neat little bundle just waiting to be dropped into the fresh pot. “Don’t suppose you got fertilizer?”

Aziraphale shook his head. He’d rather assumed Crowley would kit him out with whatever he needed, an expectation which Crowley was already well on his way to satisfying.

“Probably just as well,” Crowley murmured, his lips twisting. “You’d have gotten something for a violet and then wondered why it was going all leggy on you.” 

Crowley slotted the package into the pot, then narrowed his eyes before tapping the bottom gently against the table to settle everything. He piled fresh soil on top, tamping it down until it was smooth as a scratchcoat and then giving the pot’s exterior a few quick squeezes to fluff it back up a bit. Aziraphale wasn’t sure what the point of any of it was, but he could tell from the precision of Crowley’s movements that the demon found all of it deeply necessary. He trimmed the excess paper, folded the edges back under, and looked around the room.

“The window--that shelf’s still bare wood, yeah?”

“Well, it’s lacquered, but yes.” Aziraphale nodded. “Why?”

“Geraniums like to be kept a bit on the damp side.” He tapped a nail absently on the perforated plastic housing the plant with its new soil. “Never mind, I’ll miracle you up something to go with the rest of the decor once we’re there.”

Crowley plucked a bottle of fertilizer from a shelf and handed it to Aziraphale, who squinted at it.

“Just follow the instructions for geraniums, starting with the next time you need to water.” Crowley tucked the plant under his arm and shooed Aziraphale back out of the room. “Come on, angel. Let’s load everything up and get you home. If we hurry, you’ll even have time for a rousing pep-talk before we head off for dinner.”

“I am not shouting at her,” Aziraphale said firmly, shoving the bottle into his pocket.

“No.” Crowley’s voice was soft, and when Aziraphale glanced over his shoulder, he saw it was half-addressed to the plant. “No, you wouldn’t, would you? Not at her.”

“I’d really rather not shout at anyone,” Aziraphale told him, frowning. He turned back when he almost stumbled, eyes better serving him on the path than on what was behind him. “You didn’t like the loveseat and couch you conjured?”

“Mm?” Crowley paused. “Oh. Well, not really a matter of liking or not, was it? Furniture and forest don’t really mix. ’sides, not like you’ll be hanging around here enough to miss it.”

“I won’t?” Aziraphale asked.

“If the last six thousand years is anything to judge by?” Crowley snorted. “No, you won’t.”

Aziraphale frowned to himself, then turned. “I could. That is, if it’s--”

Crowley waved him off, weaving around him effortlessly and grabbing one of the bags Aziraphale had left by the door.

“Don’t put yourself out, angel, I know you’ve got a business to run.”

“Oh, hang the business!” Aziraphale shut his mouth with a snap the moment he heard himself say it, but Crowley was already turning around to stare at him, eyebrows raised halfway to his hairline and his own mouth hanging open.

The slow blink of those golden eyes was a question unto itself, and Aziraphale flushed. It deserved an answer, didn’t it?

“We’ve spent a thousand years pretending not to know each other and hiding our… our association,” he said quietly, not quite able to meet Crowley’s eyes. What if the demon really didn’t feel the same way? Aziraphale hadn’t considered it until just now, had assumed they were on the same page about what _our side_ meant. “I don’t want to say we could make up for lost time, but we could, perhaps, if you’re amenable, conduct ourselves more… as it pleases us. Going forward.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t want to intrude, or impose, but it’s just that... Well, it wasn’t purely self-interest driving our decisions, was it?”

Crowley puffed out his cheeks and looked around, then shivered. “Heaven’s gates, angel.”

“Oh.” Aziraphale stared at him, trying to school his face into something approaching self-possession. “You really don’t feel the same way. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to--”

“Angel,” Crowley cut him off, shaking his head. “It’s not that. It’s just… look, can we talk about this tomorrow? It’s been a long decade.”

“Ah. Of course.” Aziraphale swallowed and tried not to think about precisely how eager Crowley had ever been to knock about with his fellow demons when he’d been on Hell’s side. “Tomorrow.”

“Come on, get your things. Don’t want to be so late we lose our reservation,” Crowley sighed. He looked like he’d be rubbing his eyes, if he had a free hand.

Aziraphale did as he was told, heart skipping a beat at the promise bound up in Crowley’s concern for their reservation. He couldn’t have scotched anything too badly, if Crowley was still amenable to taking him to dinner.

Once they were at the shop, Crowley left Aziraphale to put his purchases away and carried the geranium to its new home.

“About here, were you thinking?” Crowley called over his shoulder. Aziraphale bustled up to the front window, nervous beyond reason over such a small thing.

“In the center there,” Aziraphale said, pointing.

Crowley rubbed his chin and looked around, eyes narrow. “That’s the ticket.”

He snapped his fingers, and a large clay pot popped into being on the top of the shelves. Aziraphale couldn’t help but smile at the clever glazing, which faded from a sky blue at the top to a blue-tinged cream at the bottom. There were a series of drainage holes at the bottom, which would let any excess water out into a generous built-in saucer.

“Not that I think you’ll over-water her, but accidents happen. No sense making a production out of it if you need to pour a little back out,” Crowley explained, slotting the plastic pot neatly into the clay. It fit perfectly, and Aziraphale couldn’t help the smile that broke across his face. “Just be sure you wipe everything down before you put it back, and no need to worry about the shelving or the books.”

“It’s perfect. She looks so much happier already, don’t you think?” he asked. The geranium’s leaves had perked up, and it seemed like the buds were that much closer to opening.

Crowley glanced at him, then pursed his lips and looked away. “Should think so, yeah.”

“Thank you, my dear.”

Crowley flushed at that, an unmistakable pink stain spreading across his cheeks, and he looked away and stuck out his tongue. “Don’t go making a thing out of it. You could have done all that with one snap of your pretty manicured fingers.”

“Yes, but I wouldn’t have known to, would I?” Aziraphale asked, beaming at him. “I wouldn’t have even known where to start, only that she wasn’t happy.” He offered his arm. “Shall we be on time to dinner?”

“Bollocks to that.” Crowley bowed and swept one arm out toward the door. “We shall be fashionably late to dinner.”

* * *

Aziraphale turned the page of his book, eyes skipping over words he’d read a hundred times already. A faint rustle of leaves off to his left told him that Crowley was finally stirring from his nap.

“Good morning, dear,” he murmured.

It had been such a close thing, when they’d pulled up to the shop, and he’d asked Crowley to come in for a drink, and Crowley had made his excuses. He’d felt a bit of a heel, insisting that if Crowley didn’t want to come in, he certainly didn’t object to going to Crowley’s flat. The shop’s dark windows had seemed almost forbidding, almost cold, with Crowley refusing to join him.

“I’m just going home and going to bed, angel, there’s no point in you sitting in my living room twiddling your thumbs all night.”

He’d been able to read in Crowley’s living room as well as his own, and the demon had had no counterpoint for that, and so away they’d gone.

Aziraphale finished his tea and stretched. Everything felt a bit clammy, but it was the work of a moment to miracle himself perfectly dry again. “Fancy anything for breakfast?”

Crowley undulated slowly along the bough to his left, then slithered carefully along the back of the divan. Aziraphale couldn’t resist running his hand along Crowley’s back, and the serpent shivered. It had been such a long time since he’d really gotten to see Crowley as a snake. Crowley doubled back and rested his chest along Aziraphale’s arm, and Aziraphale swallowed a tiny gasp at the heat of him. It had been a long time for that, too.

“ _What do you sssay to ordering in?_ ” Crowley asked, eyelids half-open and tongue tasting the air with a complete lack of urgency.

“Did you have someplace in mind? That darling bakery on the corner you’ve been steering me away from, maybe?”

“ _Sssaving that one for a ssspecssial occasssion._ ”

“My dear, we saved the world, and our superiors tried to kill us, and we told them to jog on and went for dinner at the Ritz.” Aziraphale smiled and ran the fingers of his free hand along the back of Crowley’s neck. “So far as I’m concerned, the rest of the year is a special occasion.”

“ _All right, then. Have it your way._ ” Crowley scrunched himself up so that as much of him as possible was draped over the divan around Aziraphale’s arm, and a menu dropped into Aziraphale’s lap.

“Oh--it’s Italian!” Aziraphale smiled. It could have been a Pret a Manger, and he’d have been unable to resist giving the same dreamy grin with Crowley warming him like this. “What would you recommend?”

“ _Who sssaysss I’ve been sssampling?_ ” Crowley asked, sniffing and pretending disinterest in the menu.

“My dear, Venice was the one place we’ve ever been where you were more interested in eating your liquor than drinking it.” Aziraphale couldn’t help an even bigger smile at the memory. Crowley had eaten so much fiamma that he’d blundered right off the street and into a canal, decided the best thing for it was to transform back into a serpent and swim off, and left Aziraphale with the thankless task of wheedling a gondolier into following a giant snake down a dark and lonely waterway.

“ _The sssfogliatella, I think, and the casssata._ ” Crowley’s tail twitched. “ _I’ll have a torrone._ ”

“Lovely.” He set the menu and his book aside, then carefully gathered Crowley to him. “Now that that’s settled, we had something to discuss, didn’t we?”

“ _After breakfassst,_ ” Crowley murmured, nestling against Aziraphale’s belly and resting his head on his chest.

Aziraphale took a breath and tried to compose himself. They could have it never, so long as Crowley stayed right where he was. He fumbled his way through all the obnoxious little programs on Crowley’s phone until he was reasonably certain that the bakery had received payment for their order, then snapped his fingers. A plate with everything they’d wanted dropped into his hand, and Crowley’s eyes immediately focused on the torrone.

“All right, then,” Aziraphale laughed, holding the plate up. His antediluvian killing machine, primed to strike down its prey. Crowley’s head rose, neck arching, and he flicked out his tongue.

When he finally went for the pastry, the delicacy of it almost disguised how dreadfully fast it was--the unerring precision of that strike, the sharpness of those teeth all smothered under the daintiness of an enormous snake scooping up a meringue.

Crowley hissed contentedly and settled back down, leaving Aziraphale to eat the rest at his leisure, free hand absently stroking over Crowley’s scales.

“This has been wonderful,” he said, when he’d finished. “The whole thing, I mean. Spending the night here.”

Crowley had seemed almost entirely at rest, a deeper sleep than he’d managed the past few nights on the sofa at the shop. The cool humidity of the apartment had reminded Aziraphale of Eden instead of those miserable first few months in Mercia, before he’d run into Crowley again. There’d even been a few hours when the air had been perfumed by one of the rarities that Crowley kept in the conservatory coming into full flower, and Aziraphale had been startled and delighted by the appearance of a pair of large, luminous moths that seemed bent on availing themselves of it.

“Given everything that’s happened,” Aziraphale continued, letting his palm come to rest on the back of Crowley’s neck, “I think… that is, I don’t know that we can take eternity for granted, anymore. Our time may be limited. So, what I have, I very much want to spend with you.”

Crowley’s tongue flicked out, and Aziraphale swallowed and squeezed him gently.

“That does _not_ mean you going to seed on the couch, staring at the shop’s ceiling or playing with your phone while I read a novel for the fifth time. Your home is lovely, and I’m grateful for the time you let me spend here. And there are.” Aziraphale rubbed his eyes and tried not to think of all the wonderful places they’d been, burned to a crisp in a nuclear holocaust. “There are so many beautiful things in the world that we haven’t seen, or that we didn’t see enough of because we were there on business. And of course, if there’s anything I can do to make the shop more comfortable for you while you are there, I’d… I’d like nothing more than a chance to try, Crowley.”

“ _Offering to redecorate the bookssshop? Sssoundsss like sssomebody’sss in love,_ ” Crowley snorted, smirking insofar as snakes could smirk.

“I didn’t know that that was ever in doubt, dear,” Aziraphale chuckled, rubbing his eyes again.

“ _You did sssay that we weren’t friendsss and that you didn’t even like me_ ,” Crowley pointed out.

“And you knew it was a childish lie,” Aziraphale countered. It had torn at his heart, the way Crowley had been so confident in that but still been able to walk away from him. He traced the hinge of Crowley’s jaw with his thumb.

Crowley exhaled slowly, almost hissing with it, and rearranged himself pointedly across Aziraphale’s belly. “ _It’sss been a long eleven yearsss, angel. It’sss going to take a few monthsss of R-and-R, and a lot of it’sss going to look like thisss._ ”

“You can’t think that’s a burden, surely?” Aziraphale asked, his palm already missing Crowley’s scales against it. He let both hands rest on Crowley’s back. “It’s been a long eleven years for me, too. I spent half of it out of my mind with the worry that I’d lose everything, including you, and half out of my mind with thinking that there was some way to fix it all, if only I could come up with it. We both need a bit of rest, and I’m hardly going to complain if this is how we find it.” He gave Crowley a small smile. “If every day for the next three months looked exactly like this one, I wouldn’t regret it.”

Crowley sighed, some residual tension draining out of him, and Aziraphale’s smile grew softer.

“I love you, my dear. However you are, wherever you are.”

Crowley flicked out his tongue and closed his eyes. “ _Love you, too, angel._ ”

“I know, dear.” He hadn’t let himself look at it head-on, had been too much of a coward to admit that it wasn’t hellfire warming him when Crowley curled up on his lap, wasn’t demonic wiles driving the cold from his soul when Heaven had turned him out again. But no matter how he’d tried to hide from it, there had been too much of it for him to bury the knowledge too deep. “I know.”


	4. Chapter 4

Crowley scowled at the paper in his hands and sighed. 

“They cannot possibly be serious. This is…” He scoffed and sat back, crumpling the paper against the table. “You know what this is? This is the sort of thing you’d have been trying to blame me for, a month ago. That’s what this is.”

Aziraphale looked up from his book and smiled to himself. “How do you know I’m not blaming you for it now?”

Crowley groaned and glared at him, then turned back to the article. “You’d better not be. I’ve never been demonic enough to inspire a ‘Warhol-esque tribute to Roy Lichtenstein,’ and I think you bloody well know it, angel. The fuck does that even _mean_? Lichtenstein by way of Warhol is just fucking Warhol, innit?”

“Couldn’t say, my dear. I can’t tell any of the impressionists apart, really.” Aziraphale tried not to smile at the half-horrified, half-frustrated noise from the table.

“I know you know who Warhol is, angel. You’re just saying that to provoke me,” Crowley grumbled, fumbling through the section until he found the rest of the article. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Name-check Sturtevant, without understanding a single blessed thing about what she was trying to accomplish--” He twisted around and stared at Aziraphale. “Did you do this?”

Aziraphale pursed his lips and gave Crowley a startled look. “Did I…? Why on Earth would I do… whatever it is you’re even complaining about?”

“Revenge,” Crowley said immediately. “You’re still upset about…” He cut himself off with a grunt. “... _things_ , and this is you, getting revenge.”

Aziraphale marked his spot and put his book aside, then turned around to face the suddenly-shifty demon at his breakfast table. “What things would those be, my dear?”

“Nothing,” Crowley said, diving back into the paper. “Never mind. Oh, hey, look at that--Fergie’s divorce finally came through. Satan, they must’ve lost the paperwork on that one. ’s wot, the silver jubilee of her and Andrew separating?”

“Might that be the American singer, dear heart?” Aziraphale asked.

“Ah.” Crowley shot him a hunted look. “Yeah, actually. Who’d’ve thought, good old Andrew picking a girl from the colonies for the second time around. Edward VIII would be getting a good laugh in if he could see things now--”

“Crowley!” Aziraphale could barely keep from laughing. Poor creature--he could only imagine what it was Crowley didn’t want to confess to.

“Not my fault the Americans are finally hitting that stage of having an empire where they get really weird about it,” Crowley muttered, pointedly turning the paper to another page. “Entirely different department, that. Never so much as sent them a memo.”

“Fergie isn’t a title, dear. The singer’s nothing to do with Prince Andrew. Now.” Aziraphale cleared his throat. “What things?”

Crowley looked at him out of the corner of his eye, then sucked at his teeth. “Putti.”

“You know, I always thought the putto was a wonderful addition to the artistic landscape.” Aziraphale’s eyes narrowed. “Which I believe I’ve told you, on several other occasions.”

Crowley slithered farther down in his chair and pulled the paper around him like a blind. His muttering was so quick and sotto voce that Aziraphale almost missed it when he said, “ _Death Comes to Pemberley_.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You heard me,” Crowley grunted, disappearing entirely into the paper.

“I really don’t think I did,” Aziraphale said, sitting back and exhaling. “You can’t really have just said that _Death Comes to Pemberley_ was you.”

Crowley put the paper down, shoved himself back into the chair, and put his head in his hands. He ran his fingers through his hair and growled.

“Look, it was meant to have been something nice, all right? You loved _Death in Holy Orders_ , you loved _Pride and Prejudice_ \--”

Aziraphale covered his face with his hands and tried not to laugh. Poor creature, indeed. “You might have said.”

“--and yet somehow those two concepts combined to make something you loathed with such an utter, righteous passion--”

“Crowley, it wasn’t--”

“--that there wasn’t a chance in heaven I was going to tell you that it was one of my misfires, now, was I?”

Aziraphale gave up trying not to laugh, and Crowley glared at him.

“Glad I kept that one under my hat for eight years,” Crowley said, crossing his arms.

“It was fine, Crowley. It was. Not what the world needed, I suppose, but hardly the worst thing you’ve done to the literary landscape over the years.”

“What else’ve I done--”

“ _The Decameron_?”

“Is hilarious,” Crowley said firmly. “You’re just a spoilsport.”

“I got written up over it,” Aziraphale reminded him.

“Not my fault your bosses were--and remain--utter wankers without the artistic sensibility She gave the average feral pig.”

“Murder mysteries set during Christmas?” Aziraphale continued.

Crowley tilted his head. “Nobody gets killed in _A Christmas Carol_. Well, I mean, I guess Marley could’ve got one in the back, but it’s not really addressed.”

“I’m not talking about _A Christmas Carol_ ,” Aziraphale said. “And that was one of mine, besides.”

“Wasn’t.”

“Was. I spent weeks talking Dickens into it.”

“Yeah, and then I spent months talking Dickens into a version that people would actually read.”

“Oh, you fiend!” Aziraphale gasped. He’d been so proud of getting the writer warmed to the idea. Crowley’s lips thinned, and he huffed to himself. Aziraphale took a deep breath and set his pricked vanity aside. “ _But_ what I was talking about was that… that Hare mystery. The one that got everyone going on the dramatic irony of murder most foul during cheery festivities. Dear Lord, it was five years before I could go see a Christmas show and be sure nobody was going to suddenly burst out with the squibs or start screaming bloody murder.”

Crowley frowned, his brows furrowing and his fingers twitching. “Wait. You’re not talking about, wozzits… _Murder at Warbucks Hall_?”

“Warbeck, but yes, that’s the one.”

“That was yours.”

Aziraphale blinked at him. “It most certainly was not.”

Crowley steepled his fingers and rested them against his lips. “You’re telling me--”

“Yes.”

“--with a straight face, that you attended every blessed Detection Club dinner until bell-bottoms went out of style--”

“Oh, piffle. They were fun! I wasn’t _on the job_ at them!”

“--couldn’t get enough of the legal-eagle style whodunnits,” Crowley ground on, merciless as a dreadnought, “and spent a summer at Judge Clark’s fucking house, but _Murder at Warbeck Hall_ wasn’t one of yours.”

Aziraphale frowned. “What’s Judge Clark got to do with anything?”

Crowley’s head tilted again, this time at a steeper angle. “What’s the author of _Murder at Warbeck Hall_ got to do with _Murder at Warbeck Hall_? Bless it all, angel, I’m too sober for this.”

“Hare, Crowley,” Aziraphale corrected gently. “Cyril Hare.”

“Was the nom de plume,” Crowley gritted, “of Judge Gordon Clark.”

Aziraphale felt a few stray puzzle pieces from decades and decades ago fit together. “Oh.”

Crowley gave a strangled little laugh and buried his head in his arms, and Aziraphale shook his head and smiled fondly.

“Well, whoever’s it was,” Aziraphale said finally, “I most certainly haven’t inspired a radical de-interpretation of pop art just because you spent a few too many dinners wittering on about the brilliance of industrial painting and Ben Day dots almost fifty years ago.”

Crowley lifted his head, shot him an absolutely poisonous look, and then let his face fall back onto his forearms. Aziraphale smiled to himself and got to his feet.

“ _Death Comes to Pemberley_ probably wasn’t even as bad as all that. It only caught me at the wrong time, is all.” He’d been gnawed to the bone trying to figure out what they were going to do about Warlock, and Crowley had been having just as miserable a time of it. He’d been in a mood to dislike it, and so he had. If Aziraphale had known it was Crowley’s work, he could have at least refrained from abusing it to the demon’s face. “I’ll give it another shot, now that things are more settled.”

Crowley’s reply, muffled as it was by his arms and the table, was unintelligible. Probably some sullen variant of “Don’t put yourself out.”

Aziraphale couldn’t help the sudden burst of love that unfurled in his chest when he looked at the demon half-sprawled across his breakfast table. Such a beautiful creature, in such an unlikely resting place. He’d never imagined they could have something like this just for themselves. 

He’d never have believed it, if someone had told him--Crowley carrying on about his courtyard being utterly devoid of life and scheming to install plants that even Aziraphale couldn’t kill, Aziraphale spending hours on end reading in Crowley’s garden with the serpent draped across him like a shawl, a geranium in the window that seemed to take specific delight in annoying Crowley by blooming no matter how ineptly Aziraphale tended to her. Every day they’d done something new, or something they’d never done together, and every day had brought a fresh round of delight that they _could_.

Aziraphale cleared the rest of the dishes and made his way back toward the sink, reaching out carelessly on his way past Crowley’s chair and gently squeezing the back of his neck.

Crowley writhed out his grip with a sharp, sudden hiss of distress, throwing himself halfway out of his seat in his rush to pull away. Aziraphale jerked back as if he was the one who’d been hurt, then stared at Crowley, stricken.

“I--I’m so sorry, Crowley, I didn’t mean to--” Aziraphale gaped at him. His eyes had gone fully yellow, the whites disappearing as if they’d never been, and he was trembling where he sat clutching at the table, gaze fixed on nothing as he tried to get his breathing under control. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Crowley, I swear! I would never--”

“You didn’t,” Crowley ground out, voice almost hoarse. He refused to look at Aziraphale as he said it, though, and Aziraphale wanted nothing more than to gather him up and soothe him and make it all so unfathomably much worse.

Aziraphale fell back a step, not trusting himself not to reach for him. “I’m not blind, Crowley. Please--”

“Bless it to heaven, angel.” Crowley’s hands balled into fists against the table. “Will you go put the fucking dishes away and stop _hovering_?”

Aziraphale fell back another step and swallowed around the lump in his throat. He forced himself to turn away, to retreat to the kitchen, to put dishes he’d far rather fling out the window quietly and carefully into the sink, to run the tap over them for a moment to soften the faint smear of yolk and rinse away the faint dusting of crumbs. When that was done, he walked slowly back to the table and sat down across from the demon, hands shoved firmly in his lap.

“Crowley,” he said softly.

“’s not you,” Crowley told him, after a long moment of nothing but deliberate, measured breathing. When he opened his eyes, some of the white had returned, but he still wouldn’t look at Aziraphale. “And it wasn’t.” He licked his lips and closed his eyes again, shaking his head. “You didn’t _hurt_ me.”

“I am sorry, though. For… whatever it was. You never seemed to mind, when I did it before. I didn’t think…” Aziraphale stopped with a bitter sigh. He hadn’t thought.

“ _’sss a bit different_ ,” Crowley hissed, then shivered. He pushed himself into a more upright position and grimaced. When he began again, there was nothing of the serpent in his voice. “It’s a bit different, with scales. Don’t know how humans blessed do it, going around their whole lives with nothing but a millimeter of skin between their nerves and the whole blessed fucking planet.”

“Oh, Crowley.” Aziraphale’s hand flew to his mouth, half-covering the sympathetic frown he knew would only further aggravate the demon.

“You didn’t hurt me,” Crowley repeated, more firmly this time. His fingers crooked, nails pressing against the wood. “It wasn’t pain. It was just…” A slow, undulating shudder ran through his wiry frame, and Aziraphale was surprised to see a flush darken Crowley’s cheeks. “... a lot. And a bit of a surprise.”

“Oh.”

Crowley’s eyes snapped up, focusing on Aziraphale’s face, and the flush deepened. “I didn’t mean it like _that_. I know you don’t… that you’re not…”

Aziraphale blinked at him as he hissed quietly and looked away. Crowley, apologizing. Crowley, brushing it aside as something Aziraphale wouldn’t be interested in. Wherever had the demon gotten that idea? Aziraphale had always thought--

He swallowed and sat up straighter in his chair. Wherever had _he_ gotten that idea? It wasn’t as if Crowley had ever said, only that given everything Crowley _did_ say, Aziraphale had simply assumed the demon wouldn’t hesitate to tell him if he wanted something more. An assumption that had just trundled right along for centuries, unexamined, until it had made itself true.

“My dear, may I… that is, I’d like to try something?” Aziraphale asked diffidently.

Crowley scoffed almost under his breath and grimaced. “Yeah. Sure. After that fucking performance, not like I can--”

“I think we can both agree to overlook a few of our less than stellar moments in recent history, don’t you?” Aziraphale interrupted, his tone precluding argument.

Crowley swallowed and nodded, his eyes flicking to Aziraphale and then away. Aziraphale got up slowly and circled behind him, keeping himself well in hand even as every fiber of his being wanted to hold and comfort. Crowley shivered but held still, shoulders slightly hunched where he couldn’t quite force them back down.

Aziraphale reached out with a tremulous hand and brushed the copper locks from the back of Crowley’s neck without touching his skin, careful as a surgeon picking where to apply the scalpel.

“You have such lovely hair, my dear,” he murmured. “I’m so pleased you’ve decided to wear it long again for a while.”

Crowley exhaled slowly, fingers curling around the edge of the table, and Aziraphale licked his lips and bent to place a gentle kiss on the now-bare nape of Crowley’s neck.

Crowley gasped at it, his whole frame going taut as a bowstring, and then his left hand shot up and back, flailing over his shoulder and grasping at Aziraphale. Aziraphale cursed silently and went to pull away, to give up that cool downy skin against his lips, only to have Crowley’s fingers tangle desperately in his hair and pull him down, pressing his mouth firmly to Crowley’s flesh.

 _Oh._ Desire coiled tight in his belly, and Aziraphale rested his hands on the back of the chair, fingers winding around wood tight enough that he wouldn’t forget himself and try for the demon’s arms instead. Crowley’s fingers curled and twisted in his hair, spasming with need, and Aziraphale let his lips part slightly, let the tip of his tongue dart over Crowley’s skin.

Crowley bent forward, his grip on Aziraphale’s hair shading into painful even as he cried out, the thin high trill of a hawk calling to its mate. Aziraphale felt the chair’s back creaking under his fingers as Crowley’s hand went limp, dropping to his side. He straightened and found that Crowley was panting softly, gilded eyes shining under heavy lids and a flush more delicate than any rococo portrait tinting his cheeks and lips.

“Oh, my dear, you’re so very beautiful.” He’d never thought to imagine Crowley like this, never imagined the demon would let him, never been brave enough to venture into that forbidden territory. Crowley, lush and lovely before him, the salt of the demon’s skin still limning Aziraphale’s tongue. Want flared in his blood, hot as Crowley’s love had ever been, and he closed his eyes against the flood of it. “Please, Crowley, please let me hold you, I need--oof!” 

Aziraphale staggered back, eyes flying open again to find a surge of black scales looping over his arms, Crowley all but hurling himself into his embrace. He scrambled to grasp the unsupported coils as Crowley wound around his shoulders, his chest, back down his arms, as frantic to be embraced as Aziraphale was to embrace him.

“My dear, I love you so much,” he breathed, spine stiffening as an answering wave of need and love and longing filled him. He lurched toward the couch, knees gone weak at the press and pry of it, half-falling and half-collapsing against the cushions. Crowley’s coils tightened, squeezing and kneading at his flesh, that quiet hiss of a voice whispering sweet nothings against his skin. 

Aziraphale miracled his clothes away without stopping to think about what he was doing, Crowley’s body left clinging to his with nothing between them, and that warmth rushed in, cracking him open and pouring into him until there was no smothered, hidden, long-neglected part of him that wasn’t consumed with it. It penetrated to the core of him and still, more was waiting, more and more until he was bursting with it.

“ _I love you, too, angel,_ ” Crowley breathed, that wicked mouth gentle against his breast even as the length of him wound around Aziraphale’s corporation from ankle to shoulders.

Aziraphale clutched the serpent’s coils to him, shivered through another wave of warmth, and then all at once he was coming to pieces with it, crying out in ecstasy and thrashing weakly as Crowley held him in that inescapable grasp and loved him without restraint or hesitation.

He shuddered through an aftershock, then finally went loose and satisfied against Crowley’s flesh. Crowley hissed quietly and relaxed, rearranging himself so that he wasn’t quite as tangled up in Aziraphale’s limbs, and Aziraphale shoved at the cushions until he was sure he wasn’t resting too heavily on Crowley’s ribs where he was wrapped around Aziraphale’s back. Once they were settled, Aziraphale stroked his spine, and Crowley settled with his face tucked under Aziraphale’s chin.

“That was…” Aziraphale sighed and blinked at the ceiling, feeling as if he’d flown too close to the sun and melted himself at the edges. He had the sneaking suspicion he’d be feeling that way for the rest of the week.

“ _A lot?_ ” Crowley supplied.

“Divine,” Aziraphale finished after a moment. He bent his head so that he could kiss the flat of Crowley’s skull, between his eyes. “Darling, I never meant for you to think I wasn’t interested. I only didn’t push because I didn’t think that… well, that you went in for this sort of thing. You kept so aloof, most of the time--I didn’t want to put you off.”

Crowley shook himself, driving them both a bit deeper into the cushions, and sent one of the blankets flopping across Aziraphale’s legs with a flick of his tail. Aziraphale flushed but couldn’t be ashamed of his nakedness, not with Crowley wrapped around him and loving him so deeply.

“ _It wasssn’t that, ssso much asss…_ ” Crowley paused, tension rippling though him. “ _I hated sssettling for crumbsss, angel. Not when you were ssso blesssed missserable half the time, and I knew I could make you happy, if only you’d let me._ ” 

He nuzzled at Aziraphale’s throat, and Aziraphale couldn’t help but laugh. “Stop that, you fiend--you know I’m ticklish!”

“ _Mmm._ ” Crowley flicked his tongue over Aziraphale’s earlobe, then subsided, content with the mischief he’d already caused. “ _It wasss hard not to go grabbing after more and sssend you running for the hillsss._ ”

Aziraphale blinked back a prickle of tears. As much as he wanted to say he wouldn’t have, he might’ve done just that, if Crowley had been too quick with it. He’d been such a fool, so many times. “Was I worth the wait?”

“ _Alwaysss._ ” Crowley’s grip on him was like iron for the space of a heartbeat, and Aziraphale let himself flex against it to feel the strength of it against his calf, around his waist, across his back. Crowley could cling to him as tightly as Aziraphale had always wanted to cling to the demon. He sighed happily and went limp, and Crowley relaxed again, sinews going soft as a cradle against Aziraphale’s body. “ _Alwaysss and forever, angel. It wasss never a quessstion._ ”

Aziraphale bent his knee to spread the blanket, and Crowley loosened the coil around his thigh. The whole operation accomplished precisely nothing of what he’d been aimed for, and Aziraphale gave the serpent a rueful smile and snapped his fingers. The cover rearranged itself neatly over the pair of them. 

“What did I ever do to deserve you?” he asked, tracing the scalloped edges of Crowley’s scales with his fingertips.

Crowley scoffed quietly and nestled against Aziraphale’s breast. “ _You want the whole lissst, it’ll take the ressst of the day._ ”

“Flatterer.”

“ _Good thing you love it when I flatter you, then, isssn’t it?_ ” Crowley smirked, lips tugging back slightly.

Aziraphale chuckled. “Maybe just the highlights, then.”

Crowley flicked his tongue out, lids lowering over burnished amber eyes, and Aziraphale let his hands rest on Crowley’s back, feeling the serpent’s voice vibrate against him as much as he was hearing it. This was what Crowley had been offering him all along, when he’d tried to coax Aziraphale into joining him. _Our side_ had meant pleasure and love as much as it had freedom and mutual aid.

He couldn’t help beaming at the serpent, and Crowley nuzzled him. 

“ _If you keep doing that,_ ” he warned, “ _you’re going to make me lossse my placsse, and I’ll have to ssstart all over again._ ”

“Perish the thought, having to listen to a catalog of my most charming qualities twice.” 

Aziraphale smiled and pressed his cheek to Crowley’s scales, closing his eyes to focus on the love the serpent was radiating. A tide of utter contentment washed over him, bearing him along toward an easier sort of bliss. He could spend the rest of the day like this and think himself the happiest principality in existence. Crowley huffed and gave up his recitation as a lost cause, and Aziraphale thought that perhaps Crowley really wouldn’t mind so much if he drifted off, so long as he stayed right where he was.

Crowley tucked his head under Aziraphale’s chin and flicked his tongue against Aziraphale’s throat. “ _Sssleep well, my dear._ ”


End file.
